RAPID FIRE - Silver Bullets

The article, "General Clark's Battles" was a negative read to those who read it at a crucial time, as the 2004 Primaries were warming up. As it was published in the "respectable" New Yorker Magazine, many liberals who subscribed to the monthly received this article on General Clark via the mail.

The problem with the article is not only did it provide false information on Wes Clark's battles with the Pentagon during the War in Kosovo, but as importantly, the views espoused in the story were blatantly biased and one sided. The truth was that the author was shown to have a clear agenda against the General.

There were quite a few questions posed to Mr. Boyers by other (more) respectable authors, but he never bothered to answer:

First from Fred Kaplan over at Slate:

Defending the General
The New Yorker's unfair slam on Wes Clark and his role in the Kosovo war.By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Nov. 13, 2003, at 7:13 PM ET
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Kosovo was the United States' first post-Cold War experiment in "humanitarian intervention." Clark, who was the U.S. Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (and who, before that, had been a military aide in the Dayton negotiations over Bosnia), supported going to war in order to protect the Kosovars from the savagery of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. Secretary of Defense William Cohen and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had no taste for interventions of practically any sort, opposed it. That much, Boyer has right. But much else, he does not.
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Then Matthew Yglesias writing in the Prospect also stepped in....

Boyer Plate Who is New Yorker staff writer Peter Boyer -- and why is he after Wesley Clark? By Matthew Yglesias Web Exclusive: 11.14.03

This week's New Yorker contains a profile of Wesley Clark with a striking thesis -- that the general's "military career, the justification for his candidacy, may also be a liability."
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Boyer appears to have made something of a career for himself as a conservative interloper at otherwise liberal media outlets. Back in 1992, his sympathetic profile of Rush Limbaugh for Vanity Fair drew praise from the conservative Media Research Center as being "fair." In 1997, as a Frontline correspondent, Boyer promoted one of the more obscure "scandals" of the Clinton years in a show (titled "The Fixers") based around an allegation that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown had been involved in a complicated scheme to convince a Hawaiian couple to buy an Oklahoma natural gas company. An independent counsel appointed to investigate the matter filed no charges against Brown.
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